How one social enterprise is leading the fight against malaria

Monday, May 6, 2013

A dose of competition is sometimes what’s required to get life-saving medicines and other needed products to urban slum dwellers and the rural poor.

Drugs to treat malaria, for example, are a recurring necessity in towns like this one east of Kampala. Uganda has an estimated 478 cases of malaria per 1,000 people per year, one of the highest rates in the world. Infections are treatable with the right drugs, so-called artemisinin-based combination therapy, or ACT.

But those drugs are too often hard to come by. They’re officially free at public hospitals, but are chronically out of stock. The drugs are expensive at private clinics and pharmacies. What’s more, as many as one-third of the ACTs sold at such stores are fake.